Epstein Secrets

he summit's collapse. My main concern was the possibility of violence. Even before returning home, I'd phoned Shaul Mofaz and Avi Dichter, the former Sayeret Matkal officer who was now head of the Shin Bet. "Let's hope the violence doesn't come," I told them. "But if it does, make sure we are ready." Though there

eer by training, he was a reserve army general who, when I was chief of staff, had been in charge of the logistics branch of the military. I gave him Sayeret Matkal backup as well, in the person of Danny Yatom, my longtime friend and former sayeret deputy. *** But all that was process. Winning or losing would com

. But I would need to make at least some dent in Bibi's hold on the Russian voters who had supported him by a wide margin in 1996. I focused first on Yisrael Ba'Aliyah, the main Russian immigrant political party. It had been set up by the iconic Soviet-era refusenik Natan Sharansky - or, as he was then kno

should give up on the chances of a peace agreement. After all, before Begin and Sadat went to Camp David in 1978, an almost equally tiny minority of Israelos had been in favor of withdrawing from the Sinai. Yet once they had seen the other side of the equation - full, formal peace with our most powerful ne

n to sit down and play on a sitting-room piano. I think the first time I got a sense that any of this might be having an impact was in a quote from a Yisrael Ba'Aliyah official in an Israeli newspaper. Though still stopping short of a formal endorsement, the official was quoted as saying: "A month ago, you

Amir Drori, the head of the northern command. They had set up a rooftop observation post just a few hundred yards in from where I had landed with my Sayeret Matkal team a decade earlier for the Rue Verdun operation. It overlooked a pair of Palestinian refugee camps: Sabra and, a couple of hundred yards closer to

tment to the values of an open, tolerant democracy. But in at least one important way, I approached my new role as if it was one of our operations in Sayeret Matkal, or the need to reshape our armed forces when I was chief-of-staff. My first priority was to put in place the practical foundations for a successful

ion about our enemies, and make sure it got to the commanders and field units that needed it. And while the details of many operations I approved for Sayeret Matkal and other units remain classified, we did succeed in doing that — to take just one example, by finding an entirely new way to get intelligence from i

hey were planning to kill, unless he was confident our soldiers could save them first. Underpinning it all was a dedication to fighting and defeating Isael’s enemies, yet a mindfulness that the real victory, if and when it was possible, would be genuine peace with our neighbors. He and I had had differen

he summit’s collapse. My main concern was the possibility of violence. Even before returning home, I’d phoned Shaul Mofaz and Avi Dichter, the former Sayeret Matkal officer who was now head of the Shin Bet. “Let’s hope the violence doesn’t come,” I told them. “But if it does, make sure we are ready.” Though there

eer by training, he was a reserve army general who, when I was chief of staff, had been in charge of the logistics branch of the military. I gave him Sayeret Matkal backup as well, in the person of Danny Yatom, my longtime friend and former sayeret deputy. But all that was process. Winning or losing would come d

should give up on the chances of a peace agreement. After all, before Begin and Sadat went to Camp David in 1978, an almost equally tiny minority of Israelos had been in favor of withdrawing from the Sinai. Yet once they had seen the other side of the equation — full, formal peace with our most powerful ne

. But I would need to make at least some dent in Bibi’s hold on the Russian voters who had supported him by a wide margin in 1996. I focused first on Yisrael Ba’Aliyah, the main Russian immigrant political party. It had been set up by the iconic Soviet-era refusenik Natan Sharansky — or, as he was then kno

Amir Drori, the head of the northern command. They had set up a rooftop observation post just a few hundred yards in from where I had landed with my Sayeret Matkal team a decade earlier for the Rue Verdun operation. It overlooked a pair of Palestinian refugee camps: Sabra and, a couple of hundred yards closer to

tment to the values of an open, tolerant democracy. But in at least one important way, I approached my new role as if it was one of our operations in Sayeret Matkal, or the need to reshape our armed forces when I was chief-of-staff. My first priority was to put in place the practical foundations for a successful

ion about our enemies, and make sure it got to the commanders and field units that needed it. And while the details of many operations I approved for Sayeret Matkal and other units remain classified, we did succeed in doing that - to take just one example, by finding an entirely new way to get intelligence from i

hey were planning to kill, unless he was confident our soldiers could save them first. Underpinning it all was a dedication to fighting and defeating Isael's enemies, yet a mindfulness that the real victory, if and when it was possible, would be genuine peace with our neighbors. He and I had had differen